In 8th grade in the 1950s, education reformer Dennis Littky remembers what it was like to see his father show up at the classroom door dangling his forgotten lunch bag.
"I felt like crawling under the desk," Littky recalls.
Times haven't changed. It's usually during middle school and high school, when many young people feel it's "not cool" to be seen with their parents, that parents or guardians tacitly oblige them by reducing their involvement in students' school and social life, says Littky.
Faced with this age-old conflict and the fact that parents, and families in general, are busier than ever, schools are being challenged to rethink and strengthen school-home ties, say experts.
But the task of building bridges between school and home is nothing new. "Family involvement is definitely on everybody's list. It's been a high priority on every school survey for the last trillion years," says Joyce Epstein, director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University.
Increasing family involvement demands that the school examine its organization and find ways to work with parents that still fit the particular needs of that school, says Epstein. Then the effort must be institutionalized, so that the level of commitment doesn't change when the people do, she adds.
A Paradigm Shift
One Rhode Island school has done just that. The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center ("The Met"), a public high school in Providence, doesn't just enroll students; it enrolls families.
Parents, guardians, or other older family members all become part of each student's Learning Team. A team holds meetings with a student throughout the school year to craft and update his personalized learning plan, which involves real-world learning gained through a series of internships. These Learning Team meetings total 10 hours during the school year, says Littky, one of the school's founders.
Parents also attend student exhibitions—quarterly oral presentations of work and learning made to a team of evaluators that includes teachers, the on-site internship mentor, and student peers. Additionally, telephone contact between teacher advisors and family is commonplace, says Elaine Walker, head of The Met's Family Engagement Committee.
The Family Engagement Committee plans schoolwide events such as open houses, orientation nights, and parent rap sessions. At the Family Skills and Talents Fair, parents set up displays to talk about their own careers, talents, and passions with students. This particular event also provides students at The Met with further opportunities to set up internships through employer contacts from other families. And to help families acclimate to The Met's unique environment, a "buddy system" pairs veteran families with new families to provide support during the academic year.
Family involvement "has turned out better than I thought it would," says Littky. Because all the students have family members taking part in their learning, family involvement isn't embarrassing for students, and students commonly welcome their visiting parents with enthusiastic greetings and hugs in the hallway, he adds.
Charlene Dickens, who grew up in Providence, says The Met offers her 10th grade daughter, Jenell, the attention that other schools cannot.
Jenell has had the opportunity to explore an interest in the field of child development through internships at a day-care center and in a 5th grade classroom. Her mother notes that she has been able to keep up with Jenell's learning journey, even though Dickens is sometimes worn down by her battle with cancer.
"I'm usually there for everything," Dickens says, referring to Jenell's exhibitions and Learning Team meetings. "I think it's great that I can be part of her life in school."
Another parent, Lisa Niebels, values The Met's family involvement program for the insight she has gained about her son Dan, a 10th grade student.
"I spend time talking to my son, and I know what he's capable of, and what his weaknesses are. I understand him and his advisor understands him," says Niebels. "He has become excited about learning and looking at learning as a tool to change and transform his life into something that's meaningful for him personally."
Such a paradigm shift in school-home relations is possible because of The Met's small size and unusual emphasis on personalized learning that focuses on a student's key interests or passions, say Littky and Walker. However, as at any school, bridging the school-home gap is a process of exploration. "We're still struggling to find the right activities for parents to get involved in," says Littky.
A growing interest in The Met's academic model is fueling the school's expansion. Work has begun on four more campuses in Providence to bring the total to six sites enrolling 700 students by 2002. And thanks to $3.45 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, plans are underway to establish schools like The Met in 10 U.S. cities.
Walker points to The Met's individual learning plan as the ideal way to involve parents in a student's school life, but she maintains that even large schools can make headway in increasing family involvement. One strategy is to hire a "high-level" person whose main job is to connect schools to families by devising ways of including parents as volunteers or chaperones on field trips, and by recognizing the skills and talents that parents can bring to the school.
Challenges to Partnership
For the many U.S. schools that have not negotiated a paradigm shift in learning and family involvement like The Met's, there has nonetheless been a growing awareness in recent years of the need to partner with parents, says Shirley Igo, president-elect of the National Parent Teacher Association.
Beyond the perennial issues of time and school accessibility, the increase of multilanguage families is forcing schools to come to terms with how they communicate with parents who don't speak or understand English well, says Igo.
However, some principals have found ways to build bridges not only between home and school, but across cultures as well.
For 11 years, Palatine High School in Chicago's northwest suburbs has been holding a monthly meeting of parents. Principal Nancy Robb says the meeting now draws up to 100 people each time, and a similar meeting in Spanish draws about 40–80 parents.
Calling these parents her advisory board, Robb has used their input to take such actions as adding an ACT prep session for students and shortening the summer athletic program from six weeks to three in response to parents' concerns that students were overbooked. The advisory board was also responsible for creating a telephone network to help ensure student parties remained alcohol-free. "Students network every hour of every day, why shouldn't we?" says Robb.
Parents from both forums, says Robb, become "ambassadors" for the school because they have information they can share and they better understand how the school works.
And Hispanic parents, whose concerns mirror those of native English-speaking parents, "become more a part of our culture. They begin to see the school as home. Even if they don't speak English, they see that we reach out to parents," says Robb.
The How-To's of Family Involvement
The key to success in forging the links between home and family is having a range of activities, "so people don't feel that they have been asked to do too much," says Epstein, of The Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships. The research center oversees the National Network of Partnership Schools (http://www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/ index.htm), providing free guidance to schools, districts, state departments of education, and universities that follow Epstein's framework for developing strong programs linking school, home, and community. Epstein has schools focus on six types of involvement: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community. Each type of involvement also includes "redefinitions" of terms that on the surface seem commonly understood. Under these redefinitions, helping with homework means how families "encourage, listen, react, praise, guide, monitor, and discuss schoolwork with their children, not how they 'teach' children school projects."
Each type of involvement also presents its own special challenges. For example, in the area of "communicating," if 70 percent of students' mothers are working outside the home, the school may need to find alternate ways of getting information to the family. It may be through technology or other parents, says Epstein, but solving such problems separates the extraordinary school from the ordinary.
ASCD Resources
Explore Joyce Epstein's framework for parental and community involvement more fully in ASCD's PD Online Course, Parents as Partners in Schooling. Enroll online at http://www.ascd.org. Click on Training Opportunities, then PD Online, then Parents as Partners in Schooling. Cost: $34.95, Participants have access to the 10–lesson course for six months. Casting a Wider Web
More and more, schools are turning to the Internet as a means of increasing communication with families and students outside school hours. While recent surveys show that more than two-thirds of U.S. schools have some Web presence, other information indicates that families don't regularly access the schools' Web sites or use e-mail to contact teachers.
The extent and nature of Internet use for linking home and school seems to vary around the country. According to a recent report in The Washington Post, the frequency of harsh e-mail and voicemail complaints to teachers prompted a group of private schools in the region to issue guidelines on parent-school relations in the hopes of toning down the stridency.
At-home Internet access is similarly high at Dixon Middle School in Provo, Utah. Dixon is located in the "Silicon Valley" of the state, populated by Internet companies like Big Planet and computer network giant Novell. Because of that presence, principal Bob Gentry says, "we have a lot of connectibility." He estimates about 75 percent of school families can access e-mail from home.
The Provo school district recently bought a Web service that allows schools there to post student grades and lets parents access them from home on a password-protected page. Dixon also offers parents workshops about how to use the school Web site (http://www.dixon.provo.k12.ut.us) and the Internet.
"The biggest benefit is that parents can put in their e-mail addresses so they can get grade updates on a weekly or monthly basis," says Gentry, who notes that the school no longer mails out report cards.
Meanwhile, the award-winning Web site at Mentor High School in northeast Ohio (http://www2.mhs.k12.oh.us/default.phtml) has seen a slower increase in parental usage, says physics teacher Tom Ramsey, who launched the site in 1995, long before the word "Internet" entered everyday parlance.
Nonetheless, Ramsey's online efforts have met with some success. About 500 parents, students, and alumni are on the Web site's e-mail roster, receiving the school's daily bulletin or information on college scholarships.
Ramsey, who oversees the student "webbies" who run the site, has taken the "if-you-build-it-they-will-come" approach. This year he wants to persuade more of the school's 150 teachers to post their assignments on the Web site, a service that educational researchers say parents want. Ramsey's Web goal, if far-sighted, is clear: "We're about changing the culture."
